Woodworking in India

The Story of my Journey as a Hobbyist Woodworker in India

Sunday, 5 February 2012

Disc Sander

A

s a DIY
person who does woodworking on occasional weekends, I know my skills can never
match those of a fulltime Indian woodworker, who has been at it for years and
learnt his craft through hard practice. Yet I aspire to make pieces as good as
any woodworker can. The problem in a nut shell is to achieve the same kind of
accuracy a woodworker can with his skill. In my case, I substitute skill with
methods of work that achieve the same level of accuracy. The way to go is by
using tools and building jigs capable of performing routine tasks, perfectly, accurately
and consistently.

I found
while building even the simplest of jigs that I could not achieve any great
degree of accuracy in making my jigs. It was a Catch 22 situation. I was
building jigs because I did not have skills but I needed skill to build
accurate jigs. After thinking about the problem for many weeks and trying
various methods, I realised I needed a few tools to achieve my purpose.

Before
coming to the tools, let me state the problem in simpler terms. One of the
hardest things to do I found was to make a perfectly flat ninety degree cut on
the end of a piece of wood. Producing a face that is absolutely flat and
perpendicular to the other faces is called squaring stock.

Take a look
at the picture below which is taken from the website workshopcompanion.com:

In this
picture the woodworker is checking one side of the stock, in this case the
edge, for squareness. Even a slightly misaligned or less than perfectly flat
edge would lead to inaccuracies and poor workmanship. Most professional
woodworkers in the West would use a jointer to produce a perfect edge but
buying an expensive jointer, or a thicknesser that produces perfectly flat parallel
panels, is not an option for most DIY people. In India, woodworkers would
usually produce perfectly flat, squared pieces of stock by eye. But this
process requires enormous skill and patience. Nowadays I find many Indian
woodworkers investing in combination machines that can saw, thickness and
produce jointing edges. But what does a DIY person do?

Pretty good
flat sides can be produced by a good quality circular saw, many makes of which
are readily available in any Indian power tools shop. Thicknessing, which is
getting the top and bootm face to be perfectly flat and parallel to each other,
can be a little tricky and rather than using a hand plane to do the job, I take
my piece to my local woodworker’s workshop to get the job done. It takes a few
second for the piece to come out perfectly thicknessed. See photo of
thicknesser sold by the UK online store Axminster (www.axminster.com) below:

It would be
great to have a thicknesser like that one but considering that one like that
would cost upwards of Rs 50,000, it is ridiculous even to consider buying one
for the home workshop.

Squaring
the end of a piece of stock remains a problem because often one has to cut
short pieces for various kinds of assembly. Accuracy and good workmanship
demand stock that is perfectly flat and square on the ends.

It would
appear that sawing would produce a perfectly square and flat edge. However, in
practice sawing more often than not leaves a pretty poor edge and even a slightly
off-square end can result in major problems.

One way to solve this is through
the use of a shooting board (see picture below).

But here
too the problem is to produce a block for the end of the board that is
perfectly flat. The Catch 22 situation again!

To cut a
long discussion short, the problem is easily solved by a disc sander, which has
a mitre attachment that makes it easy to hold a piece of stock at a right angle
to the sanding disc to get a perfectly square and flat end.

I decided
to buy a disc sander for doing smaller jobs with a degree of precision and
finally settled on a 10 inch disc sander made by the well-known German company
Proxxon. I must say I am pretty happy with the machine and have been practising
making perfectly flat ended stock.

My Proxxon Disc Sander

I find that I need a lot of patience to wear down stock made of hard wood such as teak. With board, plywood, acrylic etc. it is pretty fast and I suppose this is understandable given that the machine is essentially meant for light work.

This is the
first time I purchased a Proxxon tool. In fact I had never heard of the company
until a friend in the UK said they produce some of the finest tools for
hobbyists. Most European online DIY and tools stores stock Proxxon products
including Axminster (www.axminister.co.uk).
Proxxon rotary tools compete with Dremel tools (see review) but tend to be more
expensive on account of their supposed superiority. A cursory reading of
reviews suggests that Proxxon accessories like tool holders are capable of
great accuracy than similar ones by Dremel.

Proxxon says this about itself: “We have been
producing PROXXON MICROMOT tools for almost 30 years. High quality fine power
tools for model makers, instrument mechanics, form makers, tool makers,
opticians, jewellers and more. All the tools you need for delicate work. They
are quiet, precise and vibration-free for extended use during hours. The
PROXXON range has over 50 machines and we are world leaders in miniature tools…Space
in our long-term location Niersbach had become too small for PROXXON. Early
September 2011 we could move into the newly built more spacious premises
providing modern office space and a big showroom in the "Industriepark
Region Trier" in 54343 Föhren, a small town just off the motorway A 48 and
just a few miles away from Trier, Germany’s oldest city. From there we are
providing service to our distribution partners in more than 80 countries
world-wide.” [For more details visit their website at http://www.proxxon.com]

I purchased
my disc sander from UMS Technologies and was pleased with their promptness and
efficiency in billing and dispatch. I paid for and got the sander in less than
five days. This is far better than average performance – most Indian vendors will
keep you hanging for weeks even after you have paid the full advance.

5 comments:

I have faced exactly the same problem.It is extremely difficult to explain this problem to a non DIY person. What comes out is the feeling that either you or your tool cannot cut straight, both of which are not exactly true. I once tried a planer to get things straight, and finally found that my floor was not level to begin with. I ended up shaving off and shaving off until the final piece was a thin shadow of the original.Yes UMS was prompt for me too. I had enquired about a scroll saw but finally did not purchase it.Vinay

Vinay,I did try to find a cheap India made disc sander on the Internet but failed and finally settled on the Proxxon machine. There are a lot of Indian manufacturers who make disc sanders but they do not seem to respond properly to email. Moreover, most of the Indian disc sanders are large floor standing machines weighing several kilos. These machines are fine for a factory but an overkill for a home workshop. But try indiamart.com or tradeindia.com to see if you can find something.